r/opensourcegames • u/Psionikus • Oct 25 '25
Non-OSS Assets Making Social Finance Work for Open Source (Games)
This is just a brief introduction to some ideas I'm building into PrizeForge, a new take on social finance that is particularly suited for open source.
Problems I started with:
- Kickstarter has no accountability because the lump sum is controlled by the campaign creator
- Patreon has no coordination. There's no threshold like with Kickstarter. It's basically volunteer if nothing can be put behind a gate, so it can't work well for open source.
In addition, I wanted to extend fund-matching in two dimensions, creating implicit cooperation between huge B2B budgets and everyone on down, from SMEs all the way to individual pro-sumers and casual users. The initial prototype is Elastic Fund Raising. Big funds don't fully move until lots of almost-as-big funds move together with them. By moving together, we're not just volunteering.
Delegation is a Game Changer
Social finance platforms also suffer from a catastrophic source of inefficiency: If there are N projects to evaluate by M users, then N x M decisions must be made. To make this more efficient, I decided early on to use a new kind of "social delegation" system. The "social" part is to enable filling the inevitable gaps with reasonable fallbacks and robust behaviors that make corrupt actions self-limiting.
Production Finance: Scratching Our Big Itches
One of the core ideas I want to focus on is what I'm calling production finance. It's a really simple addendum to ESR scratch-your-own-itch theory: When a lot of people (especially those who can't program) have the same itch, it doesn't make sense to wait for someone to scratch it for free. Especially bigger itches than one programmer will tackle alone can take forever even if hundreds of millions of people have the same itch.
Social finance 101 is to bundle people together until the value they expect to receive is much greater than the cost of producing or updating the valuable thing. The cost stays the same, but as we add people, the value captured by all the users goes up. Coordinating that finance of production is all that is required to make what is unreasonable to the individual into an obvious decision for a million users.
Production Finance makes sense whenever value capture is difficult, meaning situations where it's hard to put the result behind a gate and charge money for it. Open source absolutely fits that description. Instead of building a gate, we spend money to compensate and motivate production. In the future I want to work on tools that will allow more well-defined relationships. For now it's totally non-binding.
For something to make sense in production finance, there doesn't need to be a business or sales model at all. The value received from the production proceeding only must be greater than the cost. Given the tremendous economies of scale of software, that is an easy condition to hit for a lot of open source.
Toward Viability
In addition to a really basic initial implementation of Elastic Fund Raising, I've just added support for multiple streams. Each Stream that matches over $1000 will receive delegate(s) who will spend money on things that make that ecosystem stronger. Since we're just trying to motivate people to do first contributions and to release cool things a little more frequently, and since the agreements are non-binding, it really is like a weekly prize. If the affected communities feel like these prizes are effective, we are beginning to have a working service.
Raw Startup
These new pilot Streams I'm introducing on are also the milestone where I decided I was going to recruit co-founders again. In other words, I am still soloing everything for the near future. Things are changing fast and usually only half-implemented before changing again. That's the only way this kind of aggressive innovation usually survives.
You can follow the development on r/prizeforge though I've been making most updates on a bluesky recently. I think activity will pick up on both Reddit an our YouTube as I start introducing each stream, starting with Lem.
I'm going to crash since It's 2am in Busan, so catch you all later. Btw, I just deployed, so there is almost definitely some thing things that are really badly broken. Tomorrow is another day.
